It seems Mozilla wants to move away from http, but here are some use cases they will be breaking:

I have a slow and expensive Internet connection used by a few people on a few different devices, I use a proxy-cache to improve page load times and reduce network traffic.

I am a parent, and while I try to be present whenever the kids use the internet, I run a proxy-filter (e.g. DansGuardian) to prevent them from stumbling across less suitable sites.

I am a service provider, and I use a transparent proxy to cache large files downloaded from international sites. This saves me about 10% of my running costs.

I am a service provider provoding internet access with high input costs, in order to provide reasonably-priced services I have quota-based products. In order to be friendly to my customers and avoid them incurring over-use charges, I inject JS notifications at various thresholds. With only HTTPS, I will just have to wait until they are over quota and then block all HTTPS traffic and hope I can redirect some HTTP traffic to a page informing them that they are over quota.

I am a security engineer for my company, for various reasons we need to be able to inspect http traffic (prevent users from visiting malicious sites, enforce productivity controls etc.).

Sure, there are technical means around some of these challenges (e.g. devices that ship with/use CA certs and dynamically generate SSL certs to MITM the traffic), but this initiative is just going to increase costs for everyone.

And who will benefit? Well, most of the main sponsors of Let's encrypt. Cisco will be selling you more network equipment that can MITM SSL, Akamai will get more business as ISPs will not be able to cache on their own and content owners will have to pay Akamai instead.

Maybe some affected parties will start blocking Firefox (or block ssl upgrade checks), or some service providers may start charging Firefox users more.

I am a supporter of open source and have used Firefox as my primary browser since before the 1.0 release, but some of the supposed security braindeadness has made life more difficult, and this is just another example, and may be the one that forces me to change to a web browser, instead of an HTTPS-only browser.

It's a radio transmitter in a can. It would take an even larger departure from known physics to make it go boom. We have a good deal of experience with radio transmitters in space.

OK, I will try to restate in my baby talk since I don't remember this correctly.

Given that you are accelerating, the appearance to you is that you are doing so linearly, and time dilation is happening to you. It could appear to you that you reach your destination in a very short time, much shorter than light would allow. To the outside observer, however, time passes at a different rate and you never achieve light speed.

I am having an equally hard time thinking of how Earth is more habitable than Mars while atomic bombs are going off or impactors are impacting. If you wait a while, sure it's more habitable than Mars. But for that moment, no.

To an outside observer. I don't think it's the same in the inertial frame.

Before we call this real, we need to put one on some object in orbit, leave it in continuous operation, and use it to raise the orbit by a measurable amount large enough that there would not be argument regarding where it came from. The Space Station would be just fine. It has power for experiments that is probably sufficient and it has a continuing problem of needing to raise its orbit.

And believe me, if this raises the orbit of the Space Station they aren't going to want to disconnect it after the experiment. We spend a tremendous amount of money to get additional Delta-V to that thing, and it comes down if we don't.

Thanks!

Brian Webb isn't listing this on his Vandenberg AFB Launch Schedule yet. I think he's going to wait until someone official tells him a date.

With some optimism that might only be thousands of years rather than hundreds of Millions.

But it's only necessary for Earth to be uninhabitable for a short time to end the Human race. And that can happen due to man or nature, today. If people aren't somewhere else during that process, that's the end.

Actually I was thinking nuclear power rather than magic.

I agree with the other commenter, there will be lots of people living in space if they can only get there. Mars is a good start.

Obviously I am missing something, then. Please fill me in on your better information sources. Email to bruce at perens dot com if you don't want to put them on Slashdot.

It's time to start planning another trip to Lompoc. The Motel 6 was sort of yukky last time. Maybe I'll try something else. There was an official visitor observation site that I found and got into last time, but that was for the Delta, and it was on Pad 4 if I remember correctly. This one is all the way on the other side of the base on Pad 7 or 8, isn't it? There are some farm roads that might be good observation sites if they are open.

I am not confident that the world will remain a hospitable place for life until we are ready by your standard.

Getting the resources and people there is very close to being within our technical capability. The task ourselves, if we perform it, will take care of the remaining gaps.

Creating a self-sustaining colony outside of the Earth's environment is going to need a lot of work, but it is not work that can ever be achieved on this earth. We have to actually put people in space to achieve this. Our best experience so far is with submarines. Academic research has so far yielded only farcial frauds like Biosphere II.

Technically, making transceivers work when there are 30 of them in vehicles next to each other can get difficult. People wonder why you can buy a dual-band walkie talkie for $60 but the one in the police car costs much more. If it's well engineered, the one in the police car has some RF plumbing that isn't in the $60 walkie talkie.

You are exactly right. One thing though, it's "Ham" or even "ham". It's not an acronym. Thanks!

You do know that science isn't the only reason to go to space, don't you?

There is the issue of continuing the existence of the Human race, and whatever other life we choose to bring with us.

Planets and suns aren't sure things, you know. We sort of take ours for granted, but there is the evidence of the sky around us. And the ominous silence of a galaxy that should be filled with intelligent life...